Still Waiting To Wake Up
by Beboots
Summary: Randall has been in the swamp a bit too long... Not a humor fic.


I wrote this in less than a day! Aren't you proud of me? ;) The idea just came to me, as I had a writers block on this other, much longer MI fic I'm writing (A/U, as of yet untitled, for what happened to Randall after the movie ... Aren't I original?), and I thought I may as well begin writing the idea, before I loose it, you know? But I just kept writing, and thought, what they hey; I may as well make it into a one-shot angst fic. This is in no way supposed to be a humor fic, so if you came here to read humor... You probably won't find it, unless you find my writing so pathetic it's funny....

I'll choose to ignore that train of thought...

Anyway... I just hope you enjoy the fic! Please review and tell me any and all ways that you believe I could improve my writing (aside from the obvious, "Stop writing!")

I don't know when exactly it was that I knew I'd gone insane. I know that I must've been mad for much longer, but I guess it's kinda hard to accept that you're mind's gone, you know?

I don't even know how long I had been in that damned swamp in backwater Louisiana. All I knew was that I'd been there too damned long. I'd been tossed into this world by one big, blue furry guy with a sense of compassion for the weak that obviously didn't apply to overworked lizard-monsters, and his wannabe comic eyeball sidekick.

Damn them! Damn damn damn damn them! Damn them for putting me here! It's all their fault! If it wasn't for stupid Sullivan, who let out the stupid child I was supposed to use to test out my stupid Scream Extractor on, and if I hadn't accepted stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid Waternoose's offer to make it... I wouldn't have been tossed into the veritable Hell that was the Louisiana swampland: home of a million gators.

I don't even know how I survived my first month there. The last memory I have of the monster world was Wazowski yelling "And he is _outta _here!" to his throw-rug companion, before a stupid human began beating me with a shovel. The next thing I remembered - aside from incredible pain - was waking up outside that rusty old trailer, half of my body lying in putrid swamp-water, my face pressed against some nasty-smelling (luckily empty) human boots. Although one of my lower arms and one of my upper legs was broken (courtesy of the human woman and her abominable shovel), and despite the raging pain in my head and upper back from, again, the woman and her shovel, I managed to slowly crawl away. I didn't know where I was going (I don't think I was lucid enough to think about such trifling things as what direction to go in), all I knew was that I had to get away. Dredging long-forgotten memories of a school 'Outdoor Education' field trip/"camping experience" from grade three, I somehow managed to remember the three priorities of survival: shelter, food, and water. Well, water was in abundance (even if it did stink horribly), and shelter was for me, at the moment, somewhere where I could hide away, safe, from nasty humans and their shovels. Now, food.

I must have been out of it for several hours, and as I hadn't eaten much in my last day in the monster world (was too stressed out about having to catch that damn kid), my stomach was noisily making itself known. But, then again, so were my broken limbs (less noisily, of course). I couldn't get food if I couldn't move (because of said stomach and limbs), but I couldn't move if I didn't have food. Quite a predicament.

It was like one of those step-by-step logic questions that my sixth grade math teacher so enjoyed torturing us with: one has a goal (for me, survival). To attain the goal (survival), one had to have the variable X (food)... or something. My aching head didn't seem to have the ability to remember whole details.

But I am a resourceful monster, and luck seemed to be with me that day (a day or two too late, it seems). Not a few feet away from were I lay, was a human garbage bag, floating half in and half out of the stinking water that was damn near everywhere. I grabbed it with my tail, and after a minute or two of manoeuvring (I was exhausted, hungry, in physical and not to mention emotional pain at the time, remember), I eventually got the bag over to me. The many uses that a garbage bag could have didn't occur to me until later. For now, I simply ripped the flimsy plastic into long strips, which I then used to attach splints (the straightest sticks I could find within ten feet of myself) to my broken limbs. They didn't exactly heal completely straight (my arm still is visibly crooked), but it was the best I could do at the time.

Let me tell you, I don't think I've ever been as grateful of having more than a single pair of arms and legs before in my life as the time I spent in that godforsaken swamp. With both an arm and a leg out of commission, my other limbs had to make up for it.

I don't much remember my first few weeks in the human world, aside from vague feelings of confusion, hunger, and overwhelming pain. It was incredibly difficult to scrape together a living in that swamp; many times in those first months I went hungry. I had great difficulty finding anything to eat: all my life I'd been buying food from grocery stores, or ordering it over the counter of some fast-food restaurant, so it was no surprise that I didn't immediately adapt to my new lifestyle. But, as difficult as it was, I did eventually adapt. I learnt to hunt. My diet consisted of small fish, frogs, and water rats, mostly, with the occasional small bird here and there.

But I had another big drawback; when I had been hit over the head (over and over and over and over again) by the woman with the shovel, I didn't get off completely scot-free. I had a long, ragged gash in between my two front fronds that took months to heal. The gash just barely grazed my left eye, leaving it half-blind. I could only see light changes in it; shadows, indistinct shapes.

At least I never had any problems with mosquitoes; they couldn't get their stingers beneath my scales.

Small mercies.

I lived by instinct for the first months, living day by day. My days were filled with trying to scrape together enough food to survive. The pain from my slowly healing limbs plagued me at night, leaving me unrested in the mornings. I had no time to think about anything but the present time, let alone try to find my way back to the monster world. The only time I could think about it was when I lay awake at night, staring at the star-filled bayou sky (when it wasn't rainy and clouded over of course). It was those times in which I cursed them.

Sullivan.

Wazowski.

And especially _backstabbing _old Mr. Waternoose...

I also cursed anybody who wasn't here, suffering with me. Which was everybody.

Celia, for making that announcement.

Fungus, for not being able to help me when I needed it. I was sure he was still out there somewhere, happily adjusting a scream intake valve or something. Probably enjoying my absence.

Even that kid, in a way.

I'm immensely surprised, now that I think about it, that a gator didn't find me then and take advantage of my weakness and eat me.

It's probably a good thing one didn't, because in my current frame of mind at the time, I probably would have welcomed the release.

I would never kill myself. That's a coward's way out. And no matter what Wazowski and Sullivan think, I am not a coward! I'm not!

But that's not to say I wouldn't have tried very hard to stop one from killing me.

My depression was made even worse when I began to hallucinate. Drinking rancid swamp water for months, or even years on end, and not being able to eat the proper amount of food for the same amount of time couldn't have been good for me.

My small shelter consisted of a blue tarp tied with rough yellow twine, salvaged from some human garbage, in between two smallish trees, and a small hole underneath that I'd dug out to curl up in. In the sweltering humid heat of summer days, it almost kept me at a comfortable temperature. It wasn't much, but it did keep me dry in the rain and the floor didn't flood. Right next to my tarp-shelter was a rotten, hollowed-out log that I used to store my meager belongings: a screwdriver with no handle I'd found lying around near the edge of the swamp (that I insisted to myself I would use someday to make a door station to get me home), some more yellow string, a few garbage bags I used occasionally to carry food, a badly chipped ceramic cup I used to drink water from, as well as half a dirty baby blanket (decorated with obnoxiously cute yellow animals I didn't know the name of on a brownish background that could have been pink in a past life), that I used to help keep me warm at night in the slightly colder times of year.

There was a stream that ran outside my shelter, not ten feet away. I remembered from somewhere that running water was always cleaner than still water, so I made it a point to always drink from the stream, instead of the pondweed covered stuff that seemed to be everywhere. Sometimes it was the proper colour water should be, sometimes it had small white bubbles around the edges, and sometimes it had a film of rainbow-coloured liquid skimmed over the top. Sometimes I would stare, absolutely fascinated, as those colors swirled around in my chipped cup, before I finally drank it. I suspect the water was only one of the many reasons I began to see things that weren't there; it couldn't have been the only thing.

The earliest sign of insanity I could recall were my dreams; before, I had been too exhausted to dream, and slept as deeply as was possible, given the situation, a dreamless sleep. But that soon ended. I had weird dreams in which I was back in Monstropolis, and was in my apartment, doing mundane things like watching TV, reading books, or even working on some small gadget, when the floor would start flooding (never mind that my flat was on the fifth floor of the appartment building). The water would keep rising, and would wash away all my stuff; my microwave, my bookshelf, my table, my bed, and so on, until there was nothing left. Then the water would sweep me away too.

I would have long, rambling, conversations with myself about the strangest things. I would talk to myself in great detail about how I'd drink an orange Slime-shake the next time I'd get one; if I'd use a straw, or just down it, and so on.

Once I even asked one of the gators that hung around the swamp if he wanted to come back to my place and have tea. Needless to say, the gator didn't accept.

I amused myself by watching myself change colour; starting at a dark purple, going to light purple, then to light blue, to dark blue, and so on through the entire rainbow. Then I'd repeat it backwards, giggling madly the whole time.

Then, one day, I dreamt that Fungus, Sullivan, and Wazowski had come to rescue me. That was when I really knew how far I'd fallen. I knew I'd gone insane, then.

I'd be a cold day in Hell the day they came to rescue me.

I have to admit, though, it had been a nice dream, at least until I woke up. I then distracted myself with getting food, and changing to all colours of the rainbow for my own amusement. The dream came regularly from then on, almost once or twice a week.

I was far gone. Really far gone.

I couldn't even turn off my... power, now. I hadn't been able to disappear fully since the day that I had been tossed into this world. That takes concentration, concentration I didn't have.

Now, it seems I couldn't even stop changing colours. Even when I was doing things like hunting for food, or scavenging for supplies at the edge of the swamp, my scales didn't stop flicking from colour to colour. As a result, I went hungry much more often; my prey saw the colour shifting and were warned of my arrival.

I grew more and more hungry. My body was incredibly thin and emaciated. I found myself becoming more and more listless. I became paranoid; I was certain that a group of people (I was never sure weather they were humans or monsters, because I never did see them) were following me around, playing brass instruments quietly 1, always the same song. As a result, I was always on-guard, always looking over my shoulder, expecting to see the glint of a trumpet or something. I was always jerking to look to the left (my blind side); sure that somebody was there.

Nobody ever was.

I didn't sleep much at all, as every time I managed to fall asleep, without fail, I would have another nightmare.

By then, I knew for sure I was insane, at least on some subconscious level. I just didn't care, I guess. It became a fact of life: the sky is blue, the snow is cold, and I am insane. 2 I didn't think about it, or anything at all, really. I had gone to the lowest possible level I ever have been.

I was starving, no doubt about that. I had grown so paranoid, I had taken to staying in and around my shelter all day, until the hunger pangs grew unbearable. Then I would go out into the swamp and try to find something to eat, more often than not coming back with nothing at all. I was just too slow, too easy to see, and even when I was trying to be quiet, I was always found out by my possible meal.

Then came the day when I tried to get up and out of my camp, and couldn't. I had woken from another, particularly bad apartment-flooding nightmare, and made to get up, but my limbs just wouldn't respond. They only twitched, and changed from a light canary yellow to an angrier shade of deep orange-yellow. I simply stared in disbelief at my legs. I tried to move them again. They didn't even twitch this time. 'Move!' I thought furiously at them.

Nothing happened.

I tried to speak.

"Move!" I said... or at least tried to say. It came out more as a hoarse croak.

My legs didn't move; only changed from the orange-yellow colour to a sickly shade of baby blue.

Dots danced across my good eye's vision. I suddenly felt sick with fear.

I couldn't move.

If I couldn't move, there was no possible way I could eat.

If I couldn't eat, that meant I would die.

It came as a great surprise to me, at that time: the realisation that I didn't really want to die.

And even worse, now I didn't have a choice.

The dots grew larger. I laid my head back onto the moss-covered ground, and tried to simply keep breathing. Now that I had to think about it, breathing seemed much harder than it had been only minutes ago.

The dots overwhelmed my vision, and I saw nothing but darkness.

When I next became aware of my surroundings, it was as if no time had passed, although I knew some had. The sound of crunching twigs and sloshing water sounded loudly in my ears. For a moment, I had been drawn back into my previous nightmare: I thought that my apartment was flooding, but I soon dismissed the idea, recognizing my surroundings.

Somebody was coming!

Logically, I ran through the possibilities. As I was in the human world, it was extremely unlikely that it was a monster; therefore it should be a human.

After a moment's listening, I deduced that it wasn't a human.

It was three.

And I still couldn't move.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and hoped that they wouldn't see the bright blue tarp roof peeking through the dense green-brown foliage.

There were indistinct voices; one deep and rumbling, a lighter one speaking with a sarcastic tone, and another high and nervous.

I could immediately tell they were coming closer.

The sarcastic one raised itself in a shout of discovery.

'They've found me!' I thought, panicking.

My panic leant me strength I hadn't had before. With great effort, my chest heaving, I raised myself onto all-eights. Slowly, ever so slowly, I dragged my suddenly heavy body away from the direction of the voices, out from under the tarp, and through the thorny bushes on the other side. The thorns and twigs caught on my scales as I tried to pass through. My tail dragged heavily across the ground behind me, grazing what seemed like all of the sharp rocks in the whole of Louisiana as it passed.

I was hyperventilating now. The voices were steadily coming closer.

I had barely gotten through the bushes when a large form simply bulled their way through them, and then I knew I was caught. I was completely exhausted from the little movement I had done, I had no strength left for a fight. I was already imagining myself being chopped up and cooked as dinner for the woman with the shovel, when the huge figure, spoke in a surprisingly soft voice.

"Randall?"

I squinted, staring at the dark shape, outlined by the bright sun at it's back, my fronds slack against my head.

I didn't immediately recognize him, not until his sidekick appeared behind him, panting worse than I was, and said something breathlessly, still in a sarcastic tone.

Sullivan and Wazowski.

I didn't let down my guard, weak as it was.

They were the ones that had banished me here! These were the guys I had fantasized about getting revenge upon for so long... And now that they were here, I couldn't do anything about it!

A low growl rumbled in the back of my throat, as I stared up, completely helpless, at my rival.

Sullivan told me something in that infuriating 'I understand/sympathize with what you're going through' tone of voice. I hadn't heard another voice but my own for so long, I couldn't decipher immediately what he said.

Something about 'help'. That was the only word I recognized.

He reached down slowly with his arms. I curled my lips back into a snarl, revealing my still-sharp teeth.

I wanted to say, 'Leave me alone!', but once again, my voice failed me. It came out as more of a quiet squeak.

But it had the required effect: Sullivan jerked back quickly, and said something to his companion, which caused my ever-present growl to turn up a notch.

Why were they here? They banished me. They _wanted _me out of the way. Perhaps they just wanted to see for themselves how far I'd fallen.

Suddenly, another figure hurtled through the bushes, also panting. Ah, yes; there had been three voices, therefore there should, logically, be three figures. Who was it?

"Randall!" This one shrieked. Sullivan reached out to stop him, but this figure simply ducked under the restraining hand and lunged towards me, colliding heavily, and began, it seemed, to spout platitudes.

I panicked. How could I not? I'd been living on guard ever since I was tossed into this world. I tried to struggle, but, again, my limbs wouldn't move. The newest figure, the one with the nervous voice, had grabbed me in between my two pairs of arms, and seemed bent on crushing my body, shouting something (joyfully?) in my face. All I could do was stare in wide-eyed terror, and my scales turned an impossible shade of pale beige-white.

I now recognized the figure as Fungus.

Fungus, Sullivan, and Wazowski.

Sullivan and Wazowski, I could explain away, but Fungus? I thought he wanted me gone. I certainly never went out of my way to show affection to him, although he had been a very good scare assistant, for all his annoying traits.

Sullivan said something again, to Fungus I believe, and he let go of me quite quickly. As soon as I did, I tried to inch my way backwards, away from the three monsters, with a small modicum of success.

Sullivan was saying something, (explaining something?), to me, still in that infuriating tone of voice. I gradually began to pick out words, and got the gist of what they were saying.

They were here to help me... rescue me? I thought they all hated me? This is a dream, like before, it has to be. Doesn't make sense.

'…I'm dreaming, but I'm not sleeping. I can't be sleeping, because I woke up!' I thought. 'And because I'm not sleeping, that I means I can't be dreaming! But that doesn't make sense, because this must be a dream... Wait, the waking part must have been a part of the dream, which means I'm still sleeping, which means I'm still dreaming...' My mind turned in circles, and the world slid out of focus. I sagged to one side.

Sullivan's voice rumbled again; meaningless noise to my ears.

I allowed Sullivan to pick me up (it wasn't as if I could stop him), and instead of slinging me over his shoulder like I assumed he would, he cradled me gently to his chest.

My tail and lower legs hung near the ground. As Sullivan began walking, they bobbed up and down with each step.

A small hand touched my tail, and I jerked it away. The hand came again, and held on lightly to my tail again. I cracked open my right eye. It was Fungus. He was holding my tail... comfortingly?

For some reason, I felt safe.

I shouldn't feel safe... My worst enemy has me at his mercy.

I should be dead....

The rocking motion of his gait brought me darkness, and it didn't leave until much, much later.

They took me out of the swamp, to somewhere else. The place seemed familiar, but I couldn't remember were I had seen it before.

They fed me proper food. Put me in a soft bed, covered with warm, clean-smelling cloth. Spoke to me in quiet voices.

Fungus was there a lot of the time. I felt his three-eyed gaze often, staring at me nervously, and heard him speaking to me in the same tone.

This can't be real.

This is a dream. It has to be. They wouldn't care. Nobody cares, least of all them.

This is a dream. I know it is. I'm just still waiting to wake up.

It's a nice dream, though.

1 Reference to Randall's musical theme in the movie! It's always there when he's on screen: a quiet trumpet or trombone playing somewhere, not much else. I'm a musician, I gotta notice these things. :)

2 Line stolen from an interfic post of Taekwondodo's on the Nutboard. Sorry, TKD, the line just fit.


End file.
